In the last couple of years, a lot of research has been done in the field of robotics. Robots are getting more intelligent and can handle a growing set of problems. One of the tasks that is currently being researched broadly is autonomous exploration.
The goal for autonomous exploration is to let a robot explore an environment efficiently and completely. However, the meaning of efficient exploration is not trivial. Efficient exploration can have different meanings depending on the problem at hand. In some cases, efficient means as fast as possible, while in other cases it is more important for the robot to use as little energy as possible. For example, considering a disaster area, it is extremely important that the robot is as autonomous as possible and the energy costs are of no concern. Autonomous exploration is the first problem researched in this report.

Another task an intelligent robot should be able to perform is Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM). This problem consists of two parts, namely mapping an unknown environment and, at the same time, identifying the position on a (partially unknown) map. Completing these two parts simultaneously poses a problem, since one part, in general, cannot be solved without the other. Essentially, this can be reduced to a chicken-and-egg problem. SLAM is mainly concerned with figuring out what part needs to be handled first and in what way, without any other knowledge. Many different approaches are published on this topic \cite{riisgaard2003slam}. The most commonly known examples are GraphSLAM \cite{thrun2006graph} and FastSLAM \cite{montemerlo2002fastslam}. The SLAM method used in this research is called TinySLAM proposed by Steux and El Hamzaoui \cite{steux2010tinyslam}.

Finally, these two components will be implemented and tested in a real-world environment. In order to achieve this, a Turtlebot\cite{Turtlebot} robot will be used together with the Robot Operating System (ROS) \cite{Quigly09}.

Based on the three topics described above, three research questions are proposed.



\subsection*{Research Questions}
\begin{itemize}
	\item \textbf{Phase 1:} How to create an efficient and accurate exploration algorithm for a mobile robot?
	\item \textbf{Phase 2:} How to create an as accurate as possible SLAM algorithm that can run in real-time?
	\item \textbf{Phase 3:} How to incorporate the algorithms in a real-world environment using a Turtlebot?
\end{itemize}

